There are so many messed up things in this world.
Chewed gum tossed to the ground for people to step in, fellow classmates cross-dressing for a womanless beauty pageant, or Pachelbel's Canon in D performed in Eb major just seems wrong right there, but playing Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride" in the middle of June for a student recital tops the cake of screwed up insanity. It's 81 degrees Fahrenheit at 8:30 pm and I have to ask myself, "Why of all pieces to play on the piano did I decide that Leroy Anderson's Christmas classic would be a good duet to perform in the month of June???" When my duet partner and I first picked the piece of music, we thought it would be humorous to play this traditional Christmas piece in the summertime. After I was given my copy of the music and told that this duet would be performed for the student recital in two weeks, all the color in my face drained as I turned the color of snow whooshed aside from a wild and crazy sleigh ride I had just gotten myself into. I was given five pages of first part crazy piano mess and told to have all of the notes of the piece down by next Wednesday. Wait a second--let me back up a little bit and say that I haven't had any formal piano training. I'm a completely self-taught pianist. I've grown up with the mentality that you can do anything you set your mind to. In eighth grade, I decided I would learn to play the dusty sixty year old piano sitting in the living room of my house. With many hours of practicing simplistic piano accompaniment to modern pop songs, I could kinda say that I played piano. Before this year, the biggest piano challenge I had ever faced was accompanying a friend of mine in a talent show (in which we surprisingly won second place). This year, "Sleigh Ride" seems to be the cursed piano piece that is haunting me. Sure, I'm up for a challenge, but you can't rush me! Two weeks until recital and I have barely learned the first two pages of music. God, it's certainly not easy keeping up with my piano partner who has studied piano privately since seventh grade. I've practiced so many hours on that piece this week that I have an aversive to that song now. I swear that after this recital I don't want to hear that Christmas song again until it's actually Christmas time.
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"If you could play any instrument in the world, what would you choose to rock out on?" Most teenagers would probably answer "the drums" or "the guitar." I'd be the odd ball who'd answer "the violin."
No offense to guitar players, but the guitar never truly made sense to me. For me, the violin a lot more sense than the guitar ever did. Whoever said that guitar was easy, I'd call that person a liar to his or her face. Violin for beginners makes sense. On violin, you have four strings and you typically learn to play on one string at a time. Violinists have a bow with rosined horse hair that is pulled across the violin strings to produce a sound. You place your fingers on the fingerboard on the spots that accurately play the desired pitches you're attempting to play. Violin makes sense. Guitar doesn't. Period. Guitars have six strings that you can accidentally knock out of tune if you turn the peg the wrong way when your instructor screams, "You're miserably flat! Tune it up!" Those evil instruments also possess frets to show you where notes are and some people on their first day of guitar class are considered absolute dum dums because they thought you placed your fingers ON the frets, rather than BEHIND the frets. And seriously, what kind of instrument forces you to learn both major and minor chords on the first week of instruction??? My first experience playing guitar purely stunk. I wasn't taught how to read guitar notes or chord charts or even tabs on the guitar; instead, I was told where my fingers should go to make a chord and from there, chords were shouted to the entire class to play. I was having enough difficulty playing on one string, so who's insane idea was it to make me attempt to strum multiple strings at a time? That first year on guitar was rough, I'll admit. This year, I have a new instructor, a new instructional book for guitar, and a new start for me to relearn guitar THE CORRECT WAY. What can I say? Things are slowly looking up for me. I can now accurately play a G scale, I know the names of all my strings, and I can play "Aura Lee" (in two different key signatures, might I add) and I've only had one week of instruction so far! While I still struggle with the whole concept of guitar "strumming" versus violin "bowing," I'm perfectly optimistic that with some quality guitar bonding time and a fair amount of luck on this foreign instrument, I can learn and conquer this instrument challenge I've been given. While the guitar doesn't click to me as easily as the violin did, I'm confident I can do anything I set my mind to. While it's not necessarily easy to broaden one's horizons, it's possible when you have the right teacher and, perhaps, the right attitude toward the challenge at hand. |
AuthorKendall Driscoll is an accomplished writer/ musician/ artist/ academic scholar. Archives
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